The rising power and prominence of the nation's loudest, meanest voices obscures what most of us personally experience: Most people are sane and generous -- and too busy to tweet. It turns out, you're right. We dug into the data and found that, in fact, most Americans are friendly, donate time or money, and would help you shovel your snow. They are busy, normal and mostly silent. These aren't the people with big Twitter followings or cable-news contracts -- and they don't try to pick fights at school board meetings. So the people who get the clicks and the coverage distort our true reality.

O poder crescente e a proeminência das vozes mais altas e cruéis da nação ofusca aquilo que a maioria de nós experimenta pessoalmente: a maior parte das pessoas são sensatas e generosas - e muito ocupadas para tuitar. Aparentemente você está certo. Nós mergulhamos por entre os dados e descobrimos que, de fato, a maioria dos americanos é amigável, doa tempo ou dinheiro, e ajudaria você a retirar a neve da entrada da sua garagem. Essas pessoas são ocupadas, normais e silenciosas. Essas não são as pessoas com um grande número de seguidores no Twitter ou contratos com canais de TV a cabo - e elas não entram em brigas durante reuniões escolares. Então as pessoas que recebem os cliques e a cobertura distorcem nossa verdadeira realidade.

Facebook and Twitter on Friday were blocked in Russia, amid President Vladimir Putin's ongoing military invasion of Ukraine. In a statement issued on Friday, Roskomnadzor, the country's communications regulator, explained the decision was made to "block access to the Facebook network" after at least 26 cases of "discrimination against Russian media and information resources" since October 2020. The agency highlighted Facebook's recent restriction of Kremlin-tied media sources RT News and Sputnik News across the EU. Hours later, Russian news agency Interfax reported that Roskomnadzor had also begun blocking Twitter.

Truth Social, a new social media platform backed by former President Donald Trump, sat at the top of Apple's free apps download charts.

The platform unveiled a soft launch late Sunday, according to Reuters, with many users prompted to join a waitlist. Some who tried to sign up reported glitches when attempting to create an account, though such issues are common in early app releases. Truth Social has been delayed several times. The full launch was first planned for Feb. 21, but that date has been pushed back to March 31.

A special set of editorials published in today's issue of the journal Science argue that social media in its current form may well be fundamentally broken for the purposes of presenting and disseminating facts and reason. The algorithms are running the show now, they argue, and the systems priorities are unfortunately backwards: "Rules of scientific discourse and the systematic, objective, and transparent evaluation of evidence are fundamentally at odds with the realities of debates in most online spaces." This produces what the authors call "homophilic self-sorting" -- the ones who are shown this content are the ones who are already familiar with it. In other words, they're preaching to the choir.

According to a recent study YouTube and TikTok track users' personal data more than any other social media apps. However, while YouTube mostly collects your personal data for its own purposes to serve you more relevant ads, TikTok mostly allows third-party trackers to collect your data -- "and from there, it's hard to say what happens with it," reports CNBC.

We all know how difficult it can be to close our social media apps and walk away from our devices. Just one more scroll, we tell ourselves. Just one more peek at a link. And then, suddenly, we’re deep down the rabbit hole of yet another feed. So, if we adults are seemingly powerless in the face of such digital temptation, where does that leave our kids?

Up to 44 million UK Facebook users could share £2.3bn in damages, according to a competition expert intending to sue parent company Meta.

Researchers at Mozilla announced this week the launch of its "Facebook Pixel Hunt" study, which seeks to track the company's immense web-wide tracking network and investigate the intel it's collecting on users. As the name suggests, this study is focused on a piece of tracking tech known as the "Facebook pixel." Chances are, you've visited a site that uses it; these tiny pieces of tech are buried in literally millions of sites across the web, from online stores to news outlets to... well, you name it. In exchange for onboarding a free pixel on their site, these sites can then track their own visitors and microtarget ads with the same sort of precision you'd expect from a data-hungry company like Facebook.

The Washington Post asks what may be the ultimate question of our times. "Whether the largest social media companies have become so critical to public debate that being banned or blacklisted by them — whether you're an elected official, a dissident, or even just a private citizen who runs afoul of their content policies — amounts to a form of modern-day censorship."

The Chinese government, which has built an extensive digital infrastructure and security apparatus to control dissent on its own platforms, is going to even greater lengths to extend its internet dragnet to unmask and silence those who criticize the country on Twitter, Facebook and other international social media.

MIT's Technology Review shares data from a Facebook-run tool called CrowdTangle. It shows that by 2018 in the nation of Myanmar (population: 53 million), "All the engagement had instead gone to fake news and clickbait websites. In a country where Facebook is synonymous with the internet, the low-grade content overwhelmed other information sources."

The technology site Recode interviewed 12 "leading thinkers and leaders on Facebook today," including the Senator pushing tech-industry updates for U.S. antitrust law, an early researcher on viral misinformation, and a now-critical former Facebook executive. "[M]ost believe that Facebook can be fixed, or at least that some of its issues are possible to improve..." Their ideas are wide-ranging, with some more ambitious and unexpected than others. But common themes emerge in many of their answers that reveal a growing consensus about what Facebook needs to change and a few different paths that regulators and the company itself could take to make it happen.

Facebook researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Facebook said Thursday it's changing its name to Meta. "From now on, we''ll be metaverse first, not Facebook first," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company's Oculus Connect event. "Over time you won't need to use Facebook to use our other services." This should highlight the companies longer-term effort to help build a "metaverse" that will bring physically distant people closer together.

When Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen was asked what motivated her to share a trove of internal company documents with 18 news organizations and researchers in India and the Middle East, her response was straightforward. “The reason I wanted to do this project is because I think the Global South is in danger,” she said.

The recent release of the Facebook Files by the Wall Street Journal and whistleblower Frances Haugen has bought the issue of children’s data rights to global attention. In opposition to this and previous actions, MyData4Children has been working with UNICEF and others to strengthen children’s data rights.

A new research paper written by a team of academics and computer scientists from Spain and Austria has demonstrated that it's possible to use Facebook's targeting tools to deliver an ad exclusively to a single individual if you know enough about the interests Facebook's platform assigns them.

Facebook is back online after a six-hour outage due to DNS routing problems. The outage took down Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger, and Oculus VR as well.

An Iowa data scientist with a computer engineering degree and a Harvard MBA has come forward as the whistleblower leaking damaging information about Facebook. They've now also filed at least eight complaints with America's Securities and Exchange Commission, which has broad oversight over financial markets and has the power to bring charges against companies suspected of misleading investors. To buttress the complaints, the whistleblower secretly copied "tens of thousands" of pages of internal Facebook research, which summarizes her ultimate conclusion: "that the company is lying to the public about making significant progress against hate, violence and misinformation.

"Harassment and abuse are all too common on the modern internet," writes the New York Times. "Yet it was supposed to be different in Germany." In 2017, the country enacted one of the world's toughest laws against online hate speech. It requires Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to remove illegal comments, pictures or videos within 24 hours of being notified about them or risk fines of up to 50 million euros. Supporters hailed it as a watershed moment for internet regulation and a model for other countries. But an influx of hate speech and harassment in the run-up to the German election, in which the country will choose a new leader to replace Angela Merkel, its longtime chancellor, has exposed some of the law's weaknesses.

Social media may be bad for our health, argues long-time technology reporter/commentator Kara Swisher in the New York Times.

Adam Mosseri may want to take a second pass at that one:

In an interview he attempted to defend the negative effects his platform has on its users by comparing social media to cars. The gist of his argument? Some people are just going to get run over, and that's the price we all pay. "We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents, but by and large cars create way more value in the world than they destroy."

Copies of the "field interview cards" that police complete when they question civilians reveal that LAPD officers are instructed to record a civilian's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media accounts, alongside basic biographical information. An internal memo further shows that the police chief, Michel Moore, told employees that it was critical to collect the data for use in "investigations, arrests, and prosecutions," and warned that supervisors would review cards to ensure they were complete.

Facebook's WhatsApp was fined a record 225 million euro by the Irish data protection regulator on Thursday after the EU privacy watchdog pressured Ireland to raise the penalty for the company's privacy breaches.

Partly at issue is how WhatsApp share information with parent company Facebook, according to the commission. The decision brings an end to a GDPR inquiry the privacy regulator started in December 2018. WhatsApp said it disagrees with the decision and plans to appeal. "We have worked to ensure the information we provide is transparent and comprehensive and will continue to do so," a WhatsApp spokesperson said via email.

Cinco gigantes das redes sociais não conseguiram remover 84% das publicações antissemitas entre maio e junho - e o Facebook teve o pior desempenho apesar de anunciar novas regras para lidar com essa questão, aponta um novo estudo.

Five social media giants failed to remove 84% of antisemitic posts in May and June -- and Facebook performed the worst despite announcing new rules to tackle the problem, a new report finds.

A user wrote:

"Twitter did something that I would not have thought possible: It stole reading from me," argues a former New Yorker writer (who was once nominated for the Pulitzer Prize). In a new piece in the Atlantic this week, they argue that Twitter "hacked itself so deep into my circuitry that it interrupted the very formation of my thoughts..."

I'm still haunted by a free 37-minute documentary I saw two years ago on YouTube called Bookstores: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content. It followed Max Joseph, the former host of the TV show Catfish (and the documentary's director) as he spoke to several reading experts (including a speed reader) about how he could form better habits. But at one point he calculates he was spending 20 minutes a day just on news, plus another 30 minutes a day on social media — which adds up to 304 hours a year that could've been spent reading books. (Enough time to read 30 books a year.)

Are we reading fewer books because of social media?

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed work life profoundly and concerns regarding the mental well-being of employees’ have arisen. Organizations have made rapid digital advancements and have started to use new collaborative tools such as social media platforms overnight. Our study aimed to investigate how professional social media communication has affected work engagement before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of perceived social support, task resources, and psychological distress as predictors and moderators of work engagement.

A pandemia de COVID-19 alterou profundamente nossa vida laboral e muitas preocupações surgiram acerca do bem-estar mental de funcionários. As empresas fizeram rápidos avanços digitais e começaram a utilizar novas ferramentas colaborativas, como as redes sociais, da noite para o dia. Nossa pequisa investiga como o uso profissional de comunicações através de redes sociais afetou o engajamento no trabalho antes e durante a pandemia de COVID-19. Também buscou-se investigar o papel do apoio social, das task resources, e da aflição psicológica como preditores e moderadores do engajamento no trabalho.

IÉ tentador desculpar as falhas do Clubhouse taxando-as de "dificuldades iniciais", mas o desing e a implementação ilustram quão pouco o Vale do Silício e seus financiadores do mercado financeiro aprenderam.

Nota dos editores: nós estamos começando a realizar nossas reuniões do Weekly Digest no Clubhouse - por favor, nos respondam (weekly-digest@ownyourdata.eu) com suas sugestões para uma outra alternativa de plataforma!

It is tempting to excuse Clubhouse’s flaws as growing pains, but the app’s design and rollout illustrate just how little Silicon Valley and its venture capital backers have learned.
Editors note: we are starting this week to hold Weekly Digest meetings on Clubhouse - please write us (weekly-digest@ownyourdata.eu) with your suggestions for an alternative platform!

Tru is a totally new kind of social media experience – designed to help solve the social media crisis.

The problem with social media isn’t just what users post — it’s what the platforms decide to do with that content. Far from being neutral, social media companies are constantly making decisions about which content to amplify, elevate, and suggest to other users. Given their business model, which promotes scale above all, they’ve often actively amplified extreme, divisive content — including dangerous conspiracy theories and misinformation. It’s time for regulators to step in.

Social media has made it possible to manipulate the masses via disinformation and fake news at an unprecedented scale. This is particularly alarming from a security perspective, as humans have proven to be one of the weakest links when protecting critical infrastructure in general, and the power grid in particular.

A mídia social tornou possível manipular as massas por meio de desinformação e notícias falsas em uma escala sem precedentes. Isso é particularmente alarmante do ponto de vista da segurança, pois os humanos provaram ser um dos elos mais fracos na proteção de infraestruturas críticas em geral e da rede elétrica em particular.

We launched WikiTribune as a unique Wiki-based news platform. Our community did an amazing job collaborating around news, sharing facts and promoting a new collaborative approach to generating high-quality journalism. Now we're taking it a step further. WikiTribune becomes a social network for people like you who still have faith in the truth. We are here to create better connections and develop productive discussions around everything that is happening in the world and is important to us. As social networks have grown, they've also amplified the voices of bad actors across the globe.